The Bonanza Trail: Ghost Trails and Mining Camps of the West

By Muriel Sibell Wolle

This classic account of Old West mining camps and gold-hunting prospectors is “a successful digging of a rich historical vein . . . phenomenal” (The New York Times).

This colorful blend of history, reference, and travelogue brings to life the frenzied search for precious metals in nineteenth-century America through a tour of mining camps and former boomtowns, many now abandoned. It reveals the unbelievable privations men endured in the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849. She follows the miners who poured in successive waves into the golden gulches of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, climbed to the deeper mines high in the mountains of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, and dared at last to penetrate the hostile Black Hills of South Dakota.

In personally following the trails of the pioneering prospectors, Wolle stumbles upon mute evidence of past bloodshed, lust, and struggle, and recreates the excitement of the period. A gifted artist, she also includes maps and “more than a hundred poignant sketches conveying the loneliness, melancholy and crumbling dryness of ghost cities which throbbed once with the hopes of many people” (The New York Times).

“The fascinating and definitive book on the ghost and near-ghost towns of the Old West.” —Lucius Beebe, The Territorial Enterprise

“Good popular history and [a] useful reference work.” —Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780253033314

Book preview

1. Indian Turquoise and Spanish Gold

New Mexico

FROM THE MOMENT we left Albuquerque and drove toward Socorro I was excited, for this was new country. Town after town slipped by—Los Lunas, with its fabulous, pillared mansion, built by the Lunas family when the entire area was part of their land grant; Belen, once the Bethlehem, or sanctuary, where hundreds of freed Indian slaves lived side by side with the early Spanish settlers. Jarales, Sabinal, Polvadera—the names themselves were musical invitations to explore this country of cactus and greasewood, tamarisk and mesquite.

Except for the rim of distant mountains, the only break in the level plain was Ladrón Peak (once a rendezvous for horse thieves) which rose out of the desert and grew bigger and more sinister as we approached it.

SOCORRO

SOCORRO, once an active mining camp, is a drowsy place with a Spanish plaza shaded by big trees, many old adobe buildings, and the church of San Miguel, one of the oldest in the country. But there is nothing drowsy about the School of Mines, and from the moment we met our faculty friends things began to hum. Sitting in the canteen over coffee, 1 listened to a bewildering number of stories and facts, most of them told by Mr. William L. Long, whose fund of mining information is profound and delightfully human.

He told the story about Russian Bill, who was really a nice guy but who liked to pose as a bad man. The camp grew tired of his pranks, and one Christmas Eve, when he became boisterous in the midst of a poker game and playfully shot off the finger of one of the players, they hanged him right there in the dining room of the hotel. The charge against him read: Hanged for being a damned nuisance.

Be sure to see Organ—it’s a real ghost town, said Mr. Long. Don’t miss Hillsboro and Kingston and Mogollon, and of course go to White Oaks and Kelly.

That very afternoon Howard E. Sylvester, of the English faculty, drove us to Kelly, a ghost camp so close in color to the mountainside against which it is built as to be almost invisible. The road from Socorro to Magdalena, the railroad town three miles below Kelly, winds back of Socorro Mountain into sagebrush country. After a gradual one-thousand-foot climb, the road crosses a desert park or llano, with the Magdalena Mountains on the left, Strawberry Peak on the right, and Ladrón Peak, a blue cone, far away in the distance.

Magdalena is a newer town than its neighbor. In 1880, when Kelly was booming, it was only a handful of tents and adobes at a stagecoach stop called Pueblo Springs; in 1884 it began to take shape; in 1885 the Santa Fe railroad completed a spur as far as the town and then found the next three miles of grade to Kelly impossible to engineer. From that time Magdalena began to grow, both as a terminus and as a shipping point for the mines. But it was primarily a roaring cow town, and even now it is a wool- and cattle-shipping center for the surrounding country. We drove through Magdalena and across the tracks to a big mill, beyond which begins the deceptively steep two-mile grade that climbs one thousand feet more to Kelly. To the right, on the highest mountain, is the Virgin of Magdalena, a formation of bare rocks so interspersed with a natural growth of shrubbery as to resemble a gigantic head with a woman’s profile. The likeness became a symbol first to the Indians and then to the Spanish-speaking residents, who see in it benign protection and look upon it with awe.

KELLY

AT THE end of the two-mile pull we saw houses in the chamiso and cedars and, turning a corner, began the final climb up a winding main street to the largest mine on the mountainside. Skeleton buildings, chimneys, and abandoned machinery, all surrounded by huge dumps, showed that big-scale mining was once carried on here.

I sketched, slowly working down the steep main street with its many ruined adobe stores, one below the other like a flight of steps. No roofs remained, only crumbling walls with gaping holes where doors and windows had been. Cracked concrete slabs in front of a dense growth of chamiso and piñon indicated the location of sidewalks. A few frame houses with porches hidden in vines, a frame church with a cupola and cross, and a number of tumbledown shacks and stables dotted the two or three side streets. Debris was strewn everywhere—rusty, rattling sheets of corrugated iron, old bed springs, broken fences, and cellar excavations filled with trash. Everything but the street was overgrown with sage, chamiso, greasewood, and cedar. Behind the town rose the mountain, covered with squat piñon pines and scarred by mine workings. To one side, on a low hummock, was the cemetery, every grave fenced in with weathered pickets.

The view from the upper end of Kelly out across the valley was tremendous: far below lay Magdalena, its buildings looking like pins in a pincushion; and clear to the horizon stretched a wide plain broken by ripples of ranges and isolated peaks. In our wanderings around the empty streets we saw three men some distance away, and once a dog rushed out to bark at the car. Only two families lived in Kelly at the time of our visit, though the town once had a population of 3,000.

J. S. Hutchason went prospecting in the Magdalenas in 1866, after receiving a specimen of ore from a miner friend who had picked it up while marching through that territory with the Union army in 1862. Hutchason never found any rock that resembled his sample, but he staked out two mining claims, the Graphic and the Juanita, and the oxidized lead-zinc ore he hacked and blasted from them he smelted in a crude adobe furnace. He shipped the pigs of lead to Kansas City by oxcart over the Santa Fe trail, and made enough to carry on his work.

In his gophering he found another outcropping, not far from the Juanita, and showed it to a friend, Andy Kelly, who ran a sawmill in the vicinity. Andy gave the claim his name and worked it for a time; but one year, when he failed to do the necessary amount of assessment work, Hutchason, who had watched its development with acute interest, jumped the claim and thereafter worked it himself. The Kelly ore was low-grade carbonates containing some galena and averaging 50-60 per cent of lead, ten ounces of silver, and a small amount of copper to the ton.

By 1870, miners who had staked claims in the lead-silver belt near the Graphic and Kelly properties laid out a townsite and called their mountainside settlement Kelly. Between 1876 and 1880, Col. E. W. Eaton leased the Juanita claim and in developing it struck a richer concentration of silver ore than had yet been found. This discovery encouraged more prospecting, and many new mines were located.

In the late seventies Hutchason sold his Graphic mine to Hanson and Dawsey for $30,000 and the Kelly mine to Gustav Billings for $45,000. Billings built the Rio Grande smelter on the southern edge of Socorro in 1881 and, during the twelve years it operated, hauled Kelly ore to it for treatment. For several years the Kelly produced the greatest amount of lead mined in New Mexico.

The town’s first boom began in the eighties when people swarmed in, some interested in mining and others in farming, ranching, and lumbering. Even as late as 1885, the year the railroad reached Magdalena, Indians roved the hills, attacking settlers and stealing horses and cattle. Once, rumors of their approach so upset both camps that an engine, coupled to a train of cars, was kept ready in case of attack, to carry the women and children to safety in Socorro. During Kelly’s period of increased mining activity, several rooming houses, two churches—Methodist and Catholic—two hotels, seven saloons, three stores, and two dance halls were well patronized. As the town continued to grow, living quarters became increasingly scarce and both hotels rented beds in three shifts, with no patron allowed to buy space for more than eight hours!

KELLY. MAGDALENA ON PLAIN IN DISTANCE

ORGAN CAMP AND ORGAN RANGE

All-night dances drew crowds, not only of miners but of cowboys, who would ride fifty miles to attend them. Magdalena’s cowboys frequently galloped up to the dances, but Spanish-Americans were discouraged from participating, although Kelly’s young bloods often crashed the bailes in Magdalena and swaggered down its wide streets looking for trouble. In the early days everyone in Magdalena wore guns, and a favorite cowboy sport was to ride furiously down the main thoroughfare whooping and yelling and shooting out every light in town. These cowboys sometimes went to Kelly to shoot out lights, and, on one such occasion, so many men dived under the table for shelter that they raised it a foot from the floor. One old-timer insists that the citizens of Kelly were law-abiding and never carried guns, and that when they fought, it was only with fists, bottles, or bricks.

Jonas Nelson had a short lease on the Hardscrabble mine. Since he didn’t have enough tools to keep a force of men employed full time, he made them work in relays at top speed, until they were exhausted. As each man threw down his tools, a member of the next crew picked them up and started working in the same frantic way. By this unique system Nelson obtained an immense amount of ore before his lease expired. Toward the end he struck a rich deposit of silver-lead ore. When he received the check from the smelter for the shipment he was so overwhelmed by its size that he threw a party such as Kelly had never seen. From Los Angeles a special train brought delicacies of food and drink and a group of captivating girls. Before the train arrived, Nelson built a big platform in front of the mine workings and held his party there. By the time it was over he was dead broke.

In the nineties, Cony T. Brown, of Socorro, who had seen greenish rocks on the Graphic dump-pile, sent some of them east to be tested. Next, he and J. B. Fitch took a lease on the Graphic property and began to ship the green rock from the dump and to blast additional tons of it from the mine. Everyone thought the men crazy until the rock was found to be zinc-carbonate, or Smithsonite—a rare and valuable deposit. Kelly’s second boom resulted from this discovery, as every dump was stripped of its greenish waste and new companies leased old properties and developed them. In 1904 the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company bought the Graphic from Fitch and Brown for $150,000. The same year the Tri-Bullion Smelting & Development Company bought the Kelly from Billings for $200,000 and built a smelter at Kelly. Zinc recoveries increased until the Kelly district became the leading zinc producer in the state. Its total mineral output between 1904 and 1928 was $21,667,950.

The big Kelly smelter at the head of the main street was finally dismantled by the Empire Zinc Company in 1922, and its machinery was sent to the company’s other plant in Canon City, Colorado. All through the twenties the Graphic and Waldo mines were active, but by 1931 the Smithsonite deposits in them seemed exhausted; during that year only one carload of ore was shipped from the entire district. In 1943, the American Smelting and Refining Company bought out the Sherwin-Williams interests and worked the lead-zinc sulphides of the Waldo-Graphic mines, but even their plant is idle today. Some mining is still done in the hills around Kelly, but the camp itself is dead, and its few miners now live comfortably in Magdalena.

Kelly was my first New Mexico ghost town, and I found it different from the deserted camps I had explored in Colorado. The country and the vegetation were different; the use of adobe instead of logs changed the appearance of the towns themselves; and the manner in which adobe crumbled was quite unlike the way in which wood weathered and rotted. If Kelly was a sample of what I was about to undertake, I knew that I had an exciting and challenging project ahead.

New Mexico’s mines cover a greater span of years than those of other states. Near Santa Fe in the Cerrillos Hills are the remains of ancient Indian turquoise workings dating back to pre-Spanish days; and in the southwestern part of the state, at Santa Rita, another ancient site, is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the country. The Spanish forced the Pueblo Indians to work in the mines, and as a result of the mistreatment they received, thousands of Indians died. When, therefore, the natives succeeded in expelling the Spaniards from their territory, they hastily hid the mines and refused to reveal them to subsequent Spanish masters. In the nineteenth century American prospectors were seriously hampered by the Utes and Apaches, who resented the destruction of their hunting grounds and the invasion of their land. The Indians harassed and intimidated and killed so many miners that they retarded by several years the development of certain areas where precious minerals were known to exist. Turquoise, silver, and copper were mined by the Indians or were at least located by them; gold, silver, and copper were mined by the Spaniards and Mexicans, and later by the Americans, whose scent for minerals was especially keen during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Most of New Mexico’s mining towns are in the mountains, with Elizabethtown northeast of Taos, and the others much farther south in several distinct ranges.

The view from any hill in Santa Fe is of a vast desert panorama broken here and there by isolated hills and edged with distant mountain ranges. The bulk of old Sandia, over fifty miles away, rises hazily from the valley floor; but much closer are a group of low, conical hills silhouetted against higher peaks. The pointed cones are the Cerrillos Hills; behind them lie the Ortiz Mountains. In this small area the oldest mines of New Mexico are found. To Indians the turquoise is a sacred stone and a talisman against evil. Turquoise deposits far south in the Burro Mountains of the state, as well as those in the Cerrillos district, were worked by them long before the arrival of the Spanish, as the discovery of stone hammers, sledges, wedges, and ancient pottery sherds in old mine workings proves.

Coronado’s search for the seven fabled cities of Cíbola uncovered no golden towns but, instead, a handful of mud pueblos in which turquoise, not gold, was used for ornaments. Espejo, Oñate, and other explorers learned from the natives of deposits of turquoise, and also of silver and lead, that lay hidden in the Cerrillos Hills; and Espejo is credited with assaying these metals in the year 1582. The mine from which they came is thought to be the Mina del Tiro, or Mine of the Shaft, which was worked by Indian neophytes under the direction of Spanish priests. The underground levels were reached through a shaft cut in the rock, with landings every few feet. Notched logs served as steps for the Indians, who carried the ore to the surface on their backs in skin sacks or in baskets. The lower portion of the mine was below water level, and the remains of a skin canoe were for many years visible at the water’s edge. Old Spanish records tell of many expeditions from Mexico to the Rio Grande missions, for the purpose of obtaining silver, copper, and turquoise from the Cerrillos area. In time, Spanish oppression caused the Indians to rebel; and in 1680 the Pueblo tribes killed all the Spaniards in the area or drove them back to Mexico. They then concealed the mines in which they had suffered, and in some cases filled them with earth and rocks. By 1692, when De Vargas re-entered the valley to reconquer the rebels, the locations were effectively lost, and for a century and a half no mining was done.

Placer gold was found near the Ortiz Mountains in the early part of the nineteenth century by Mexicans, and in 1879 the Cerrillos mines were rediscovered by Americans who were looking for gold and silver. In the old mines they found stone axes and other indications of early workings. The new mining boom lasted only a few years, but it was long enough to cause the town of Cerrillos to grow and to produce two new silver camps—Bonanza and Carbonateville—in the Cerrillos Hills. During the first part of the twentieth century the turquoise mines in these hills were also extensively worked, and quantities of fine stones were mined. Archaeologists, who have uncovered quantities of turquoise at Chaco Canyon and in other Indian ruins, are certain that the stones came from these same mines centuries ago. Only a few miles from Cerrillos are the sites of the Old and New Placers—mining districts from which millions in gold were washed in the first half of the nineteenth century.

OLD PLACERS (DOLORES)

TO REACH the site of the Old Placers, one goes from Santa Fe to Lamy and then to Galisteo, an old Spanish pueblo which has retained more of its early charm than most adobe towns. Beyond Galisteo the road winds to the still older town of Dolores, where the Old Placers were located. Though this whole area was visited by the Spanish as early as 1540, the placer deposits were not found until 1828, when they were discovered by a Mexican herder who, while searching for lost cattle on Ortiz Mountain, found rock similar to that he had seen in the gold fields of Sonora. The thick bars of sand and gravel which had washed down from the mountain were worked diligently until the middle thirties, when they were deserted for the New Placers just discovered on the opposite side of Ortiz Mountain. Even with crude wooden bateas, $60,000 to $80,000 worth of gold was obtained annually from the channel of the Galisteo River and what is now Cunningham Canyon.

In 1833 a vein of gold-bearing quartz, the probable source of the placer deposits, was found on the Santa Rosalia Grant, which belonged to José Francisco Ortiz. The Ortiz mine, as it is called, which is half a mile above the town of Dolores, is one of the oldest lode mines in the country. Since its owner knew nothing about working it he took a partner, Don Demasio López, a Spaniard, whose successful operation of the mine made it a substantial source of income. Ortiz was delighted and talked so extravagantly of its wealth that several unscrupulous men persuaded him to get rid of López and form a partnership with them. By unearthing an obsolete decree which forbade Castilians from living in Nuevo Mexico, they forced López to leave. Under their management the mine stopped producing entirely. Since then the Ortiz and other mines on the mountain have been developed by different companies, but the boom days of the Old Placer district are over.

NEW PLACERS (GOLDEN)

THE Cerrillos-Madrid road turns south from the Albuquerque highway about ten miles southwest of Santa Fe and cuts across rolling country toward the New Placers, near Golden on the western side of the Ortiz Mountains. The road skirts the Cerrillos Hills with their eroded, piñon-studded rock formations, and it passes through Cerrillos, the railroad center for the busy towns of Dolores, Golden, and San Pedro in the days when placer mining was in full swing and children panned gold in the arroyos. The fire of 1890 destroyed part of the town but spared the two-story Palace Hotel, whose faded elegance still lends an air to the less imposing adobes which form a large portion of its buildings.

The night before my visit to the site of New Placers it stormed, and the highway was powdered with fresh snow. Beyond the coal town of Madrid the road climbs gradually to the sprawling adobe village of Golden, most of which lies along one street. Adobes dot the slopes above the business center and across the arroyo, which cuts a gash below and to the right of the road.

A church, surrounded by a cemetery, fills a nubbin of hill at one end of the town, and the remains of placer mine workings dominate the other end. One new mill, in which copper concentrates are stored, stands on the brink of the arroyo; the ruins of a stamp mill sag beside the road. The one store, Ernest Riccon, General Merchandise, in front of which men and boys sun themselves against the warm adobe walls, displays a sign reading, Open Every Day, also Sunday.

In 1839, eleven years after the first diggings at Old Placers, some prospector or herder found rich deposits in the San Pedro Mountains on Lazarus Gulch and in the tributaries of Tuerto Creek. To Tuerto, the new town which grew up just north of the present town of Golden, flocked the miners from Old Placers. They sank small shafts into the gravel to cut a streak of pay ore and followed it laterally until it pinched out. Only the crudest of equipment was used: dry washers and bateas, round wooden bowls in which the earth was placed, submerged in water, and stirred until the heavy gold particles sank and the residue could be floated away. By 1845 Tuerto was the center of the district and contained twenty-two stores; yet today no trace of it remains. Placering continued sporadically in the district during the next forty years, but Golden’s boom did not come until the late eighties and nineties. In 1900, when its population was 3,000, the town contained a bank, a stock exchange, a newspaper, and many saloons. Its mines were east of the townsite and were worked for their gold, although some copper was recovered and processed at San Pedro, a nearby camp. Pockets of gold are still found at bedrock, especially after heavy rains have washed fresh gravel into the stream bed.

SAN PEDRO

THE road between Golden and San Pedro became progressively narrower, and the higher it climbed into the mountains the deeper the snow lay on the ground. The old town was shown on maps as four or five miles beyond Golden, but we found no trace of it, even after struggling up a steep, winding hill whose slippery surface was a mixture of snow and sticky adobe. High on the mountainside I spied a mine and some buildings but no town; so we turned back. As the road swung left at the bottom of the hill, we found the empty pueblo, which on our way up had been hidden by a low mound. It was truly a ghost town in 1951, full of ruined adobes, foundations, one or two frame or corrugated-iron shacks, and an adobe church whose windows were shrouded with sheets of rusty tin. Behind it was a long, black dump, and near it some useless machinery.

Gold and copper properties were first opened at San Pedro by the Spaniards in 1832; by 1845, when José Serafín Ramirez secured a Mexican land grant of more than 31,000 acres which included the gold placers and the copper mine, the area was full of men panning gold.

When Lieutenant J. W. Abert visited the San Pedro district in October, 1846, it was alive, and his report to Congress says in part:

In the evening we visited a town at the base of the principal mountain; here, mingled with houses, were huge mounds of earth, thrown out of the wells so that the village looked like a village of gigantic prairie-dogs. Nearly all the people there were at their wells, and were drawing up bags of loose sand by means of windlasses. Around little pools, men, women and children were grouped, intently poring over these bags of loose sand, washing the earth in wooden platters or goat horns. [R. E. Twitchell, Leading Facts of New Mexico History.]

A formal townsite was not laid out until 1880, when the San Pedro Milling Company began large-scale development of the mineral region by constructing reservoirs in the nearby canyons and laying pipes from them to the placers. Both the big copper mine on the hill and the placers on the flat were worked for some time, until several consecutive years of drouth cut off the water supply and litigation shut down the smelter. A gold strike in 1887 again woke the village to action. I knew nothing about the town until I was handed Volume I, Number 1, of a small, yellowed newspaper, the Golden 9. This ten-page weekly was published at San Pedro, and copies of only its first two issues—July 18 and July 25, 1889—are extant. It was hard to picture the completely deserted and almost nonexistent town as ever needing a newspaper. The first number quotes a paragraph from the Albuquerque Democrat:

So far as the prosperous condition of San Pedro is concerned at present, the greatest credit is due to half a dozen men. . . . To Thomas Wright belongs the credit of giving the camp a starting point from a four years’ sleep. To Messrs. Webb and Wright belong the credit of standing by the miners in adversity and prosperity for over nine years. Since Mr. Wright opened the famous Lucky, hundreds of miners have been attracted to the rich fields. . . . Had the Lucky not been discovered and its wealth exposed to the world by Thomas Wright the many thousands of dollars now circulating at San Pedro and Albuquerque would be a hidden treasure in the mountains instead of, as it is, lining the pockets of operator, merchant and miner—everybody, in fact, but the newspaper man, whose only duty is to attract the attention of other people to the place where they can make a fortune and fare better . . .

The San Pedro Copper mine, high on the mountain beyond the town, produced several million pounds of metal between 1889 and 1892, and the Golden 9, in the first flush of mining hysteria, accurately reflected the exuberance of the reactivated camp:

July 18—Everybody is coming to San Pedro and the rest of the world will be used as pasturage.

Timely Remarks.

People from afar contemplating removing to San Pedro will do well to ponder on a few hints we have compiled for their benefit. Bring a tent. If this is not possible, then bring along wagon sheets, canvas, table covers, door mats, gunny sacks, umbrellas, etc. with which to improvise a tent-shack or tepee in which to live until you can make a dug-out or build a house. . . . There are no vacant houses in town. . . . There are families here living in coke ovens. Others have nothing but a town lot.

Some idea of the number of homeless people pouring into San Pedro may be formed [from] the hillside late in the evening on looking around upon the hundreds of camp-fires brightly burning.

Possibly a more varied assortment of residence buildings have never before been seen as are now going up in San Pedro. Unprecedented demand has exhausted the supply of building material. Log houses, frame houses, adobe houses, sod houses, pole houses, stone houses, conglomerate houses, mixed houses, and dugouts are going up by hundreds.

When a man buys a San Pedro town lot at a nominal figure, washes out about $1000 in placer gold in his back yard, and strikes a lead in his cellar, he isn’t taking long chances.

Mr. Kelly of Golden, yesterday dropped into the hand of our local scribe a little gold button which only weighed 23 ounces and was worth only $425. He took it right away again too.

A case was tried before our local justice yesterday, wherein a saloon keeper had knocked an unruly customer through his window and then sued him for the price of it. The case got too deep for the local legal talent, and it was declared off.

All during the early part of the twentieth century San Pedro had spurts of activity, especially during World War I, when a copper shortage reopened its mine. Today a new copper exploration project, partly financed by a government Defense Minerals Administration loan, has stirred the ghost town back to life.

ELIZABETHTOWN

NOT quite thirty years after the discoveries at New Placers, gold was found in the mountains far to the northeast of Santa Fe, and Elizabethtown, five miles north of Eagle Nest Lake and easily reached from Taos over good mountain roads, sprang up near the mines. If I hadn’t read about Elizabethtown, I might have driven through it without stopping, for the scattering of houses and stores on the bare, sloping hill hardly looks like a settlement that in 1868 contained 7,000 persons; yet, from its placer and lode mines $5,000,000 worth of gold was recovered.

The wide, rich fields of the Moreno River valley were Apache and Ute hunting grounds, secure from the prospector’s pick and pan until the middle sixties, when an Indian went to Fort Union to trade hides and furs and displayed some copper float to a few of the men stationed there. W. H. Kroenig and William H. Moore paid the Indian to guide them to the outcrop from which the float came; it proved to be close to the top of Baldy Mountain, the highest peak in the vicinity. There in 1866 they drove location stakes and began to develop the Mystic Lode copper mine.

Later in the same season, while a group of prospectors from Fort Union were camping on Willow Creek, one of them began washing gravel from the edge of the stream and discovered particles of gold in his pan. Since it was too late in the year to work the sands, he marked the spot, swore his comrades to secrecy, and then returned to the Fort for the winter. Long before spring the news was out, and as soon as the weather permitted, scores of men were off to Willow Creek to stake claims and begin panning. Two of the men, Mathew Lynch and Tim Foley, crossed to the south side of the gulch and, while exploring the east slope of Baldy, discovered the Aztec lode. Others found gold on the west slope of the same mountain a few hundred yards east of the present townsite of Elizabethtown, and named their location Michigan Gulch. When the placer field was found to extend for nearly ten miles along the foot of Baldy, prospectors tripped over one another to reach the northern Moreno River valley, where they were soon washing colors from every gulch and creek bed. Grouse and Humbug proved the richest of all, and their gravels were easily washed because of the water in both creeks; but the other gulches—Pine, Big Nigger, Anniseta and Mexican—and Spanish Bar, in front of Grouse Gulch, were all black with men and bristling with location stakes.

Charles P. Clever, delegate to Congress from the Territory, said of the diggings in 1868:

One company of five men with a sluice ninety feet long were taking out $700 in gold per week, others were just commencing and were realizing less, but a fair remuneration. . . . By October, 1867, the company of five . . . were taking out $100 apiece per day. . . . One company is now constructing a ditch or canal to bring water upon portions of these fields. This ditch will cost $100,000. . . .

A town has been laid out near the principal washings: it is called Virginia City and will without doubt soon be a place of much importance. There is hardly a day that new discoveries of gold are not made in that portion of New Mexico.

If Congress will only give some help to these hard working men, by constructing a good wagon road from Maxwell’s ranch to Virginia City—and it can be done for the small sum of $30,000-$40,000—all kinds of supplies can be readily got in at cheap rates; when more and more poor people will flock thither and will soon give back to the government in return, the gold now so much needed. [Quoted by Ralph E. Twitchell in The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Vol. III.]

After John Moore and T. G. Rowe laid out and surveyed the townsite early in 1868, the rapidly growing settlement chose a new name, Elizabethtown, in honor of Moore’s oldest daughter; and almost before Colfax County was sliced off Mora County in 1869 and the Territorial Legislature designated the gold camp as county seat, the name had been shortened to E-town. The first few years of the camp’s life were its boom days. Gold brought twenty dollars an ounce just as it came from the dripping gravel, quartz veins yielded ore which assayed $2,000 a ton, millions were skimmed from sandy bars, and only the richest and most easily obtained gold was considered worth mining.

The years 1868 and 1869 were the most productive in the district; but as the number of active placers increased and the population soared to 7,000, the need for more water, both for the town and for the mines, became apparent. The only solution was to build a ditch which would tap mountain water and lead it to the dry river valley. Some attempts of this sort had already been made: Thomas Lowthian brought a ditch from the north side of Baldy to his claim in Grouse Gulch, and miners on Spanish Bar dammed the Moreno River above their diggings. But the supply provided was not enough. Finally, businessmen from Fort Union and Las Vegas became sufficiently interested in the project to undertake it, and the construction of the forty-two-mile E-town or Big Ditch began. It was completed late in 1868 at a cost of $280,000, and the first water was delivered to Humbug Gulch on July 9, 1869. When still more water was needed, additional ditches tapped Moreno Creek and the Ponil River; the surplus water was held in reservoirs or lakes high in the Red River Mountains. The ditch had a capacity of 600 miners’ inches of water, but because of its great length and the consequent amount of seepage and evaporation, a much smaller amount was delivered to its several users than was anticipated. Although it was never the paying investment its backers had hoped it would be, it saved the miners during its several years of operation.

All this time the camp was growing. Henri Lambert, once cook for Grant and Lincoln, drifted into E-town to try his hand at placering. Within six months he was running a hotel. In 1871 he left for Cimarron to open another hostelry, the famous St. James, which is still in existence. By 1869, when E-town’s first newspaper, the Lantern, appeared, the camp contained seven saloons, five stores, one drugstore, two hotels, and three dance halls; and gamblers, gunmen, and hangers-on had flocked to the noisy, lusty, false-fronted settlement. Guns were the law, claim jumping became a common practice, and when things got too hot, the Vigilantes held a necktie party, after which the rough element quieted down or slipped out of town. When a frightened woman confessed that her husband killed and robbed everyone who spent the night at their wayside hotel, the sheriff and his deputies rode off to arrest the murderer. They found him burning the bones of his patrons and took him back to town to stand trial. Fearing that his cronies might pack the jury, the miners took him from the courtroom and dragged him through the streets at the end of a rope until he was dead.

By the seventies three stage lines—one from Springer, one from Trinidad via La Belle, and one from Questa—rolled into town; but travel was still hazardous. In 1873 Coal-Oil Johnny and Long Taylor held up a coach in Cimarron Canyon and robbed it of $700.

By the middle seventies the placers were wearing thin, and Indians, who still claimed the country as theirs, were so troublesome to the miners that most of the population drifted away. A few die-hards remained and even brought their families into the surrounding valley, where they built homes and pastured cattle on the grassy meadows, and a few lode miners stayed on and worked their properties, the War Eagle, Red Bandana, Paragon, Puzzler, Only Chance, Bull of the Woods, and Heart of the World. But it was not until H. J. Reilings’ big dredge began to tear up the Moreno valley in 1901 that E-town boomed again and its hotels and saloons overflowed with people.

Reilings, who had been operating a dredge in Bannack, Montana, built the big boat on the lowlands below E-town for the Oro Dredging Company at a cost of $100,000. Its capacity was 4,000 cubic yards of earth a day, and each cubic foot sucked into its hungry maw yielded from thirty cents to three dollars. At first no one would risk hauling its heavy machinery from the railroad at Springer through Cimarron Canyon to E-town, for the boilers alone weighed 21,000 pounds each, and the danger of their rolling off the wagons and injuring drivers and animals was great. When Jack Bennett and Charles Webber of La Belle took the contract, bets were placed as to how long delivery would take. As soon as Webber got the first boiler chained on his wagon, he phoned that he was starting his fifty-five-mile trip. Two weeks later, after he and his crew had widened roads and built bridges, he arrived!

The big gold-boat was completed by the summer of 1901, and on August 20 everyone from E-town and vicinity, as well as a carload of eastern stockholders, stood beside it while speeches were made. Mrs. Mougey of Ohio christened it with champagne, saying as she did so:

With the authority given me by the powers that be, I christen thee Eleanor. May thy wheels never turn without profit to thy owners; may there be no loss of gold in thy boxes; no leakage of water in thy seams. May harmony and success prevail. May our kind host gather wealth and comfort from thee and ever continue to be one of us—a good fellow. [Manville Chapman, New Mexico Magazine, November, 1937.]

For four years, except during the coldest months when the stream was frozen, the dredge worked two shifts of men a day. It paid for itself within a year. Then it was mortgaged to raise funds for the company’s new dredge in Breckenridge, Colorado, and when the mortgage was foreclosed it was sold at a sheriff’s sale. Its new owners did little with it except keep a watchman in its cavernous hull. Year by year, after he left, it sank lower and lower into the sand and ooze until only its pilothouse was visible. Now even that has disappeared.

E-town was deserted when I visited it, and the wind blew in cutting blasts across its treeless streets. On the crown of one low hill is a church, built of stained and weathered boards; on the top of another hill is the cemetery. Below the church, which dominates the townsite, stands a schoolhouse, and in front of that are two or three terraced, grass-grown streets, reached by rutted roads. Tall sagebrush hides many of the foundation holes, in which debris and fragments of sun-tinted lavender glass lie jumbled together. In one the carcass of an upright piano lies flat upon its back. The entire rear wall of a stone-and-adobe pool hall has been torn away, and in it only a billiard table and part of a bar are left. The false-fronted store in which George Greely, its proprietor, was shot to death in 1886, can be identified by the dim letters which spell George’s Place. E-town may come alive in summer, when fishermen and tourists roam the mountains and cattlemen drive their herds into the fertile valley and up the slopes of Old Baldy, but in February it is only a rattling husk.

WHITE OAKS

NOW that I had seen E-town, the most typical northern camp in the state, I was ready to explore the southern and western mining towns, beginning with White Oaks. The drive south from Albuquerque to Socorro was familiar ground by now, but the seventy-five miles between Socorro and Carrizozo, across a barren desert and over sinister lava beds, were both tedious and lonely.

In Carrizozo we inquired the way to White Oaks and were told to drive three miles toward Vaughn, then cross the railroad tracks and go up the lane till we reached it. Each mile the lane grew narrower and steeper and finally turned into a bed of rocks from which all top surface had washed away. However, at the end of nine miles we saw buildings and the Cedarvale Cemetery and knew that we were getting close. Just before we entered the wide main street, lined with ruined buildings, crumbling adobe walls, and foundations and cellar excavations filled with trash, we crossed an arroyo on a decrepit wooden bridge which gave a loud crack as we drove off it.

Farther up the street, surrounded by sagebrush and chamiso, two or three brick and stone buildings stood in stately isolation; and at the far end of the thoroughfare was a tiny adobe marked Post Office, in which two or three people were waiting for the mail to be sorted. They could tell me nothing about the place in its prime, but one of them suggested that I find Mr. Dave Jackson, who has been here since the year one. Only the mountains have been here longer. As we started across a ravine toward his house, we met him coming for his mail. He was an elderly Negro and rather deaf, but he knew White Oaks, and his stories of it brought the town to life.

Cowboys discovered the first glittering particles of gold in a stream bed in the Jicarilla Mountains not far from White Oaks in 1850, while they were searching for stray cattle. Lone prospectors searched the gulches thereabouts for years afterward and placered a little here and there, but found nothing spectacular.

Thirty years later, Jack Winters and another prospector whose name differs according to the source (Harry Baxter, George Wilson, or John Wilson), were panning gold in a gulch on Baxter Creek, ten miles south of the Jicarillas, when a stranger, also named Wilson, rode into their camp and joined them at lunch. He was restless, however, and while the others were eating, he took a pick and his food and said he was going to the top of the mountain to find a gold mine. Part way up he stopped to rest and sat on a big blowout of rock at which he chipped idly as he ate. The fragments which broke off glittered, and he put one or two in his pocket. It was nearly dark when he reached camp again, but his samples of rock still glittered. Both the other men let out loud whoops when they saw them and insisted that, tired as he was, he guide them to the place from which the specimens came. They set their stakes by lantern light on August 14, 1879. When they asked Wilson what his full name was, in order to record it with theirs, he countered by saying that he didn’t want a share in the mine, he wasn’t interested in gold, and as soon as his horse was rested he’d be on his way again. Some accounts of this story add that a Texas sheriff was not far behind Wilson and that he climbed the mountain, not to look for ore, but to scan the surrounding country for posses. The two prospectors then offered him all their ready cash—forty dollars—a pony, and a bottle of whisky, and, completely satisfied with the deal, he rode away and was never heard of again.

WHITE OAKS. EXCHANGE BANK ON RIGHT

INTERIOR OF DESERTED CHURCH, WHITE OAKS

The lode which he uncovered became the famous North Homestake, from which large amounts of ore were taken even before systematic development released its deeply hidden treasures; its total yield up to 1904 was $525,000. In November, 1879, the property was divided, Winters retaining the North Homestake and John Wilson taking over the South Homestake. The latter, too, was a great success, as it also produced slightly more than half a million dollars by 1904. In 1880 the men sold both properties to a St. Louis company for $30,000 each, and the newly created Homestake Company began at once to develop the mine. A twenty-stamp mill was built in the gulch below the new townsite and was supplied with water from White Oaks Spring.

The discovery of the Homestake started a stampede, first to Baxter Mountain, which was soon covered with prospect holes, and then to the surrounding hills. Many other lodes were found: the Comstock, Little Mack, Smuggler, Rip Van Winkle, and Old Abe. The Old Abe is said by some authorities to be the original strike in the district and to have been found by Abe Whiteman, who was one of the first to explore the area, attracted to it by the placer gold occasionally found in the gulches. He staked a claim a few hundred feet down the gulch from the North Homestake; but before it proved up he disposed of it, so the story goes, to William Watson for one dollar. Watson developed the mine and found, to his amazement, that he had a bonanza which during its first year of operation occasionally produced $35,000 in a single week, much of its ore averaging $100 a ton. In 1890 one of the richest veins of high-grade ore was opened, and during the next twenty-five years, as the shaft sank farther and farther into the earth, gold continued to pour from its depths. Even when the shaft reached 1,400 feet, no trace of underground water hampered mining operations. After John Y. Hewett and his associates became owners of the mine, another $1,000,000 was taken from the spectacular property.

The North and South Homestake mines and the Old Abe brought thousands of people to Baxter Mountain and the vicinity, and before the end of 1880 the booming camp of White Oaks was laid out and surveyed, and the townsite was covered with tents. The plat showed several streets—White Oaks Avenue and Livingston and Jicarilla Streets—but at first only tents, log cabins, adobes, and hitching racks lined the muddy, rutty tracks with the imposing names. The Western Klondike lasted twenty years, and within that period a solidly built town replaced the hurriedly constructed shelters of the early eighties. Stores and homes of red brick or of native stone increased in numbers, and a large $10,000 brick schoolhouse on one side of town balanced an equally large brick residence on a knoll on the opposite side.

During the eighties and nineties White Oaks was the liveliest town in the Territory, and its Exchange Bank, which still stands, was one of the busiest in New Mexico. Its second-floor offices were used by several lawyers, soon to be well known politically: W. C. McDonald, first Governor of New Mexico under statehood; H. B. Fergusson, delegate to Congress; and John Y. Hewett, attorney and the town’s leading businessman.

As the population grew, three churches, two hotels, a planing mill, and a newspaper office were added. In fact, four weekly papers were printed in the busy little city between 1880 and 1905: The Golden Era (1880-1884), The Lincoln County Leader (1882-1894), The Old Abe Eagle (1885-1905), and the New Mexico Interpreter (1885-1891). Emerson Hough, author of The Covered Wagon and many other novels, was a reporter for the Golden Era and practiced law for a short time while the town was growing up. The locale for his Heart’s Desire is White Oaks, and Abe Whiteman is one of its characters.

Although on June 10, 1882, the Red River Chronicle reported that The White Oaks Vigilantes took a horse thief from the jail and hung him, the town soon settled down to a more humdrum existence. On June 24, 1887, the New Mexico Interpreter remarked smugly,

There is no more orderly city west of the Allegheny Mts. than White Oaks. . . .

Our Supreme court, M. H. Bellomy presiding, held a session Wed. and Thurs. White Oaks is too peaceable to make this court a financial success and we hope it may continue so.

Advertisements in the tattered, crackling, brown sheets of the New Mexico Interpreter for 1887 and 1888 mention Ah Nue, a Chinese cook for the Bar W Ranch during the seventies, who came to town during the boom, opened a restaurant, and sold Oriental goods on the side. Ah Nue’s songbirds, which comprised one shipment of merchandise, were described as

the best in the country, and his

cages the most beautiful. Those desiring a

lovely singer should give him a call.

His prices are very low.

Ah Nue remained in White Oaks sixty-five years and was a great favorite with the townspeople. When he died at the age of 101 years, The businessmen paid tribute to him.

The town enjoyed its celebrations. One year on the Fourth of July it turned out in such numbers for a picnic at which the Declaration of Independence was well read, that a table 130 feet long, loaded with the good things of life, was needed to serve the hungry throng. In September, 1888, a three-day tournament was held, at which the chief attractions were the baseball game between the White Oaks Club and the Lincoln Club for a purse of twenty-five dollars, the dance held each night in a new store building, and various races. These included a fifty-yard foot race, a first-class horse race of 400 yards for a purse of fifty dollars, a second-class race for cowponies and horses with no records, and a Fast and Slow Burro Race with a purse of five dollars and an entrance fee of fifty cents for each participant.

When 4,000 persons lived in the hidden mountain valley and floundered through the mud and dust of its main street, the Interpreter inquired pointedly, Has not the time arrived when White Oaks Avenue should have sidewalks its entire length? And how about a railroad to move our gold bricks? asked the mining companies, which were getting tired of shipping bullion by stage across the Oscura Mountains to San Antonio, over seventy miles away. The Interpreter joined in the clamor and during 1887 crusaded for a road by frequent allusions.

July 8—White Oaks is bound to be one of the best towns in the territory. It has the precious metals and immense beds of coal right at its doors and when railroads reach that portion of the country, White Oaks will grow rapidly.

July 8—President Detwiler of the El Paso and White Oaks railroad has succeeded in successfully negotiating the franchise to New York parties, and the sale will be completed if the El Paso people ratify the terms. It is generally understood that just as soon as work begins from El Paso into Lincoln county, the Santa Fe road will push work on the proposed line from Socorro and Carthage to White Oaks, and it is a certainty that the Santa Fe will get there first.

October 5, 1888—Over 60 carloads of ties and timbers for the White Oaks road have been received and are being unloaded. The Kansas City, El Paso and Mexican Railway, known as the White Oaks road is being pushed with great vigor. . . . But where is the A. T. & S. F. Railway that have so constantly made the assertion that they would build the first road to White Oaks?

As negotiations went on, a meeting of the town’s property holders was called, for the purpose of considering a right of way and depot grounds. Hewett and the other businessmen were so certain that the railroad would have to come through White Oaks that they demanded too high a price for the land and would make no concessions. The road officials then decided to by-pass White Oaks and lay their track through Carrizozo and Capitan instead; whereupon the local committee changed its tune and begged for the road on any terms. But they were too late, and White Oaks’ big moment was past. The best they could get was stage connections with Carrizozo, ten miles away. At first the loss did not affect the town, and it continued to boom. The Interpreter for October 21, 1891, mentions that

Several wagons loaded with men, women, children, poultry and furniture arrived in town Wed. afternoon. The prospect now is that they will be obliged to become dwellers in tents and wagons, for there is hardly a vacant house in White Oaks.

But shortly afterwards, as Mr. Jackson put it, The people’s heart went out of their business and the town began to go down. One by one families drove away with their possessions piled around them, and the number of empty houses grew. Cattle wandered once more over the hills, pitted now with prospect holes and scarred by ore dumps, and the few remaining families tore down deserted sheds and cabins for fuel. Building after building disappeared until whole blocks were razed. Only a few brick and stone structures are now left to watch, with sightless eyes, ultimate destruction creeping toward them. Hewett’s big house is one of them, and his bank is another.

Behind White Oaks Avenue stands a one-story stone building, well-proportioned and enriched by a pilastered façade. I crossed the rough, sage-dotted ground of the ghostly town to reach it. The double doors were barred, but the north wall had been torn open, leaving a gaping hole many feet in diameter. Climbing on a pile of toppled rocks and debris, I looked inside. The building was a church, and its interior was in a sad state of ruin. At one end a raised platform ran the width of the room; on the plaster-strewn floor lay a chest of drawers and a blackboard; in one corner, leaning rakishly against the wall, was a large wooden cross; and painted on the wall was the faded inscription, They that seek . . . shall find me.

According to Mr. Jackson, twelve families lived in White Oaks in 1951. The day of our visit we saw but six people, and as we left the quiet place, the tinkle of a cowbell sounded musically in the distance. What a contrast to White Oaks’ days of deafening stamp mills and bawdy gaiety issuing from Mme. Varnish’s Little Casino!

ORGAN

BETWEEN Carrizozo and Organ black lava beds and white gypsum sands break the monotony of the dry, cactus-studded desert. Just before sunset we started the climb over Organ Pass, and a short distance beyond the crest we reached the ghost town of Organ. Its one street is lost beside the highway where cars streak by, their occupants unaware that a few old false fronts and Bentley’s stone store mark the site of a once-prosperous mining camp. Mr. Bentley, an elderly man who now owns the town, has seen it grow and fade since his arrival in 1903. We found him in his store surrounded by merchandise, some old, some new. Going to the door with us, he pointed out the various mining properties, especially the Torpedo across the road and the Stephenson-Bennett to the south.

Organ’s lead-silver vein was discovered in 1849 by a prospector whose name has since been forgotten. Hugh Stephenson, who was living near the Rio Grande at the time, was interested in the property from the start and later acquired it. Although he had little capital with which to develop the mine, it produced steadily under his supervision, and its ore was packed by burros to his small adobe smelter by the Rio Grande to be processed. He sold the mine to army officers from Fort Fillmore in 1858 for $12,500. By this time it had produced $90,000, and by 1904 its total output was $500,000.

Other lodes were opened in the vicinity in 1863 and again in 1881. Of this second boom the Rio Grande Republican of July 23 says:

Two months ago not more than a dozen prospectors were camped in the Organ Mountain mining district. Now this whole territory is as full of busy life as an ant hill and all are enthusiastic over their prospects.

Another spurt of mining took place in the early years of the twentieth century. The Torpedo, which was only a prospect in 1900, is said to have produced $1,000,000 in copper and silver when its shaft was only 300 feet deep. In 1905 it was closed by litigation, or, as Mr. Bentley put it, It was a freezeout. While the boom lasted, Bentley ran a boardinghouse as well as his store. When the Torpedo company asked him to install a bar, he refused. The company officers then explained that, unless he did so, The miners would go to Las Cruces to get drunk and be gone three or four days—too much time lost from work. He put in the bar.

Below his store, overlooking the wide Rio Grande valley, is the stone schoolhouse he built. There used to be eighty scholars and two teachers in it, he said proudly. All miners’ children, too. This camp will come back when the mines pay again. We’ve got the ore.

Across the highway from the little oasis, so full of memories to Mr. Bentley, stand the concrete foundations of the Torpedo mine buildings; above them loom the bare and frightening teeth of the Organ Mountains. Somewhere in those barren, upthrust pillars of stone was Father La Rue’s legendary lost mine.

In 1797, Father La Rue and his parishioners in Chihuahua, Mexico, were facing starvation after a period of drought. A dying stranger, to whom the father had recently administered the last rites, had described a gold-bearing vein he had worked in the mountains two days’ journey north of El Paso del Norte. Recalling the man’s description, Father La Rue decided to lead his emaciated people into this northern territory, find the mine, and establish new homes for them in kindlier terrain. The serrated turrets of the Organs were easily recognized from the stranger’s description, and Father La Rue turned east toward them. Following his directions, the men found placers and gold lodes and for a short time lived comfortably.

When Mexico City authorities learned that a priest and his parishioners had disappeared from Chihuahua, a party of soldiers was sent north to find them. Father La Rue, realizing that the mine and its treasure might cause greedy men to attack the little community and steal the gold, kept guards posted along the trail leading to the settlement. On the day the sentinels reported the approach of soldiers, the priest led his men to the mine entrance and ordered them to hide all the gold they had mined and conceal the opening. By the time the soldiers arrived no trace of mine or gold was to be found. The priest explained the reasons for his departure from Mexico